ENGINEERING HUMAN HAPPINESS.

International Social Progress. By G. A. Johnston. (George Allen and jlnwin. 10s. 6d. net.)

The Economic Illusion. By Arthtir. Bertram. (Leonard Parsons. ' 7s. 6d. net.) PRACTICAL social thinking, the kind of thinking that is aimed

directly at human betterment, as such thinking is carried on amongst us to-day, will probably stand comparison, and easy comparison, with the best efforts in the same kind, of any age

whatever.. This is sufficiently illustrated in sonic changes of emphasis, which would be more noted by us if they were not so familiar. In our endeavour and search after a new social

righteousness, there was a time, not so long ago, when the great difficulty was to shake people out of their indifference, to get them made uneasy about the state of the world, and willing to do some good. At the present day it is different. To a large extent this is done ; people are awake ; the will is already there. The problem is only to know how. And small as is the headway we have made with this problem, little as we

yet know how to compass actual, concrete human good, the best of the thinking that is being turned to-day in that direc- tion, the best of the practical planning which has that_for its end—from our liberty-education to our garden cities-7-will assuredly stand comparison with the best of any age that the world has seen. So much so, that the books which tell of it— the annals of contemporary social effort, as they pour upon us weekly from the press—ought to thrill us. And they would. Their account of what is being conceived and what is being accomplished, in the name of humanity and for the social, progress of the.rworld, would thrill us, if only we could get immersed in the story, and by some means or other contrive to forget the skeleton that is in the cupboard all the time.

But there lies the rub. Namely, that behind so much of our social thinking, especially the very best of it, there stands this sinister figure, this contemporary social pessimism, shadow of ultimate defeat ; this skeleton in the cupboard, which we instinctively feel that the best of our leaders of social thought are more than half aware of and by some conspiracy of accident are agreeing not to look at.

Happily, there are those who both know that the skeleton is there and are honestly not afraid of it. And by all such, a book like Mr. George A. Johnston's lucid and polished account of what has been aocomplished by a great organization within the League of Nations, the International Labour Office (which he has known from the inside since its commencement), will be read with avidity and gratitude. The story of how this

organization, long before either the War or the Peace, struggled into existence, got its hands on to the levers of concrete international action against crying labour abuses, and was eventually taken up, moulded into shape and incorporated in the constitution of the League by the Treaty of Versailles, will be found by any who can give themselves up to it to be not a little inspiriting and heroic.

And just as this informed account of what has actually been done in international social progress makes good reading, scarcely less good are the two several accounts before us, by Messrs. Gordon and Cohen, of what might be done and very well may be done, in the sphere of domestic social progress, in the way of protecting our working populations against the increasing uncertainties of life—sickness, unemployment and all the rest—by dint of synthesis, by a comprehensive unifica- tion of the warring systems of insurance which are in operation amongst us, systems which, though themselves really trophies of social advance, do yet at present jostle each other and get to cross purposes with each other so badly, and introduce so much needless waste and confusion. At least for those who can give themselves up to it, we say again, surely no age can compare with ours in the kind of inspiration which records-of the concrete application of thought to social service can provide.

But there are those who will not let us pursue this enterprise of social amelioration in peace ; who have decided that the skeleton shall not stay in the cupboard ; but shall be out, and shall be thrust straight under our noses, and kept there ; it is good for us. To this order, apparently, belongs the writer of Population and the Social Problem. Many in the thick of the fight will want to come forward and wish him cordial greeting. But they will find it difficult. For he is a laughing gentleman. And in the Bergsonian way ; the way of laughing at us, rather than with us. And he laughs at all of us, without exception. He laughs at religion and the priests ; he laughs at the kings. He has his laugh at the politicians and the militarists. At the political economists especially he laughs, with their be-spectacled endeavour to sort out this jungle of a social problem ; and also at " philoso- phy, whatever that may be." And so with Socialist and Syndicalist, Philanthropist, Labour Leader and all the rest. He laughs at them all because he knows something, which he thinks they mostly do not know ; or rather, because he sees something which they almost universally do not seem to see. His book is about this thing. His book, in a way, of course, is about Population ; but not quite exactly. It is rather about a thing which he calls population-pressure, and which he con- ceives after the manner of the pressure of steam in a boiler. In plain words, the urge that is upon our human race to multiply is altogether out of proportion to the room there is for multiplication ; and yet, with this plain fact before us, we go attributing our misery to a hundred and one different secondary causes and keep continually tinkering at them. Such tinkerings are all our social schemes. The fact is, a pressure is behind us, urging us make more people than there is room for ; and we cannot get that pressure off. Before there could be " no population-pressure " there would have to be room for "'physiological fertility " ; that is to say, a child a year for thirty years to every female of the species ; and however fast our command over the means of subsistence may expand, it cannot keep pace with that I And so we arrive at the somewhat veneered, but fundamental, pessimism of the book—as our social sufferings are inevitable, let us learn to be charitable and not mete out blame, when the trouble is really due to a law of nature.

But with all this author's insight, it is extremely hard for at least one reader to be convinced that there is not some- thing further which the author himself is not seeing, This

pressure will never come off, he says. But what exactly is it that will not come off ? Imagine that some miracle—he con-

templates thiS case—made the earth expand and made the available subsistence increase in just the geometrical progres- sion required for " physiological fertility." It is not suggested

that the pressure would be off even then. It would be up against a limit in one direction. It could procreate no more children. But there would still be quite enough steam left in the boiler to seek out_every weak spot and work all the old damage. What would the author have us to understand then 2 What, except this—that it is hopeless to try to be rid of the elan vital? But surely we knew that ! And who wants to be rid of it ? We agree, its pressure.is what does all the damage-- and its pressure is what does all the good. This pressure in the human soul ! Is it not just this, well distributed and nobly carried, that makes all the beauty and the happiness and the good that is vouchsafed to man possible ? In one word, it is fatally easy to assume, with the cruder type of Freudian, that our search for well-being is a simple endeavour to get rid of repressions. But in reality it is " repressions " that liberate. This author is a keen thinker. He takes the population-problem very deeply. We only wonder whether 'he sees altogether just• how deeply. We would suggest on the one hand that, understood so profoundly as all this, his " population-pressure " is not a thing we want to be rid of ; land, on the other hand, if we do take it as something we really want and need to wipe out, we can stop it by actively engineering happiness, as well as by passively awaiting the onset of misery.

And so, banishing at least:this particular skeleton from out the cupboard, we may let ourselves return to the fray again ; 'andto the question how happiness, as far as may be, is to be engineered. And much as we disagree with Mr. Bertram's views as to where exactly the " illusion " lies, which keeps us from it, we are entirely with him in thinking modern mankind are being cheated of a real measure of happiness ; that we members of an industrialized society are unhappy—not, alto- gether, of course, but largely—because we have not understood the conditions of our existence. There Could accrue, and there ought to accrue, from our material progress and our dominion over Nature a result altogether more beautiful and desirable than that which, in fact, does accrue. Mr. Bertram offers us a diagnosis of the spot at which, in his view, these more desirable results have escaped. For they have indeed given us the slip. But so far as we have understood him, he places the weakness.just where Carlyle placed it. Carlyle, as he rode past the workhouse, saw. fields of waving corn on the right of him calling to be reaped ; and on the left of him, around the workhouse door, willing men hanging heavy and hopeless hands. He saw the landless men facing the manless land ; and asked in trumpet tones, Why should these things be ? Well, it may seem a hard saying ; but while a Carlyle writing in the 'forties may be suffered merely to cry out about it—in however inimitable tones—more is demanded to-day, even of the hum- blest writer. For the work of Carlyle and Dickens, as we 'hinted above, is done. People are shaken out of their torpor. 'They want to know how. Mr. Bertram senses this. For while 'he is gifted as a writer, his driving impulse seems less to write and rouse than to impart understanding. But does he do so ? Does his diagnosis succeed ? We are compelled to be brief and dogmatic, but we cannot feel that it does. What is wrong with the world; he seems to say, put very briefly, is that so few of us keep and so many get themselves kept ; with which, if we have at all succeeded in being fair to him, we very much agree. But it is not easy—for us at any rate—to get from his book any crystallized idea of where the line between keeping and being kept is to be drawn. And yet, we hasten to say, this seems all that is lacking. This done, a beginning might be made to the task of encouraging the one function and gradually killing off the- other ; a road being thereby opened back to social health ; which again would be at least the beginning of a beginning to the task of engineering human happiness up to something like the degree naturally to be expected from that mipressive and 'increasing command over the resources of. Nature which industrial civilization has brought us.

J. W. Scow.